The Stars Of Forbes' 30 Under 30 In Energy And Industry

Forbes 30 Under 30 project in the past couple over years has had a dedicated section for up-and-comers from the energy sector -- everything from fossil fuels to solar power, nuclear and battery technology.

This year we decided to expand that section to include both energy and "industry." It's a kind of catch-all to include young entrepreneurs that are innovating in old-school manufacturing businesses or inventing things that don't easily fall under the "technology" rubric. Regardless of whether it makes much sense to include bicycle and sneaker makers in the same subset as solar upstarts and nuclear power prodigies, that's what we've done.

As you can see by clicking through the slideshow of our 30 finalists, Forbes staffers Joann Muller, Aaron Tilley and I have found some great young visionaries. We're already looking for next year's 30 -- so leave your names in the comments below or drop me a line at chelman@forbes.com.

So many of the young upstarts on our list are destined for incredible success, but here are a selection of some of my personal favorites (you can see their pictures in the slideshow):

Jessica O. Matthews, Uncharted Play

At an engineering class for non-engineers at Harvard, Jessica O. Matthews and classmate Julia Silverman were challenged to tackle a social issue using art and science. Their only intention was to come up with something that "should be good enough to pass a class, a thing that would be nice to have exist in this world," says Matthews.

But the more they thought about it, they realized they could actually make a difference in the world. Having both traveled through Africa (Matthews' parents are from Nigeria), they had experienced first-hand how millions of people lived with little to no electricity. Visiting her relatives in Nigeria, Matthews saw first-hand how when the power went out would simply power up a diesel generator. That was commonplace to her relatives was unacceptable for Matthews. "The fumes from the diesel generator were horrific. I was appalled that this was how people had to live."

They also had seen how impoverished children would create soccer balls out of rags, bags or anything else. It dawned on them, says Matthews: "It would be cool to have a ball that generated power."

They dreamed up the idea for a soccer ball with a built-in battery that gets charged by absorbing the kinetic energy of the soccer ball being kicked around. Later on, mechanical engineers made the dream reality -- the ball's internal gyroscopic mechanism harnesses the kinetic energy from kicking the ball, then stores it as electricity. A half-hour of soccer can charge the battery enough to power a plugged-in LED light for hours.

To commercialize the Soccket Ball, as it's called, they launched a company called Uncharted Play (Silverman has since left the company). The ball has already received rave reviews from the President of Nigeria, who appointed Matthews as an Ambassador of Entrepreneurship for Nigeria.

The ball could help improve the quality of life for millions around the world who live without electricity and rely on smoky, expensive kerosene lamps for light in the evenings. The ball is not nearly as esthetically pleasing as a well-made soccer ball. When you kick it you can tell it has something unusual inside. That's why the engineers that Matthews hired to design prototypes were initially pessimistic about the product. "But they didn't understand the costs of kerosene, or the fumes," says Matthews. "I know, from watching kids playing with balls constructed from old rags that if you bring them anything round and white they're going to kick it."

After college, Matthews worked at a crowd-funding start up called CrowdTap. It showed her that all sorts of wild ideas could readily receive enough funding to get off the ground. She also started working with the Clinton Global Initiative and made the realization that "an idea is great, but you need to build a company around it." She initially raised $100,000 for the Soccket on Kickstarter. That was followed up with a $500,000 convertible debt round.

Uncharted Play is currently manufacturing balls in a factory in upstate New York. They're not cheap to make, but they've managed to get the production costs down in the range of about $60 per ball. Matthews says she expects to have some available for retail at the World Cup in Rio as well as the Olympics. But don't expect to see the ball used by the pros. "It's not a high-performance ball. It doesn't bounce as much," says Matthews. But you have to understand the market. "It's an ethical product and an educational tool." (You can buy it here for $99.)

Matthews may soon be managing rampant growth. This November Matthews traveled to Nigeria to meet with government officials and to discuss manufacturing Soccket Balls there. She also is planning extensions to her product line, including an electric-generating jump rope, skateboard and (American) football. "This is a for-profit social enterprise. It's not a power company, it's a play company."

Jamail Larkins, Ascension Air

Jamail Larkins started flying airplanes at the age of 12 and was immediately hooked. Because the Federal Aviation Administration bars anyone under 16 from flying an airplane solo, Jamail had to travel to Canada, where he first soloed at age 14. He became an entrepreneur as a teenager in order to finance his flying lessons. He met John and Martha King, owners of the King School, which sells flight training products. They set him up as one of their distributors. He soon added a distributorship for Gulf Coast Avionics. Still in high school, he was selling thousands of dollars a year of equipment while also performing stunts in air shows. In 2000 the FAA named Larkins the national spokesman for its Young Eagles program. He created Larkins Enterprises to provide aviation consulting services. In 2006 he got into the airplane brokering business, forming a joint venture with an established broker to sell general aviation aircraft. His Ascension Air is now a leading regional distributor for Cirrus Aircraft, the leading manufacturer of piston-driven planes. His dream is to grow the business of selling fractional shares of these planes. "I want to become the Netjets of piston-driven aircraft," he says. His accomplishments got him named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and he was named the first Ambassador for Aviation & Space Education for the US Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration. Fun Fact: "Fastest I’ve ever gone is Mach 1.2 (approx 913 MPH) about 500 feet over the water. One of the coolest experiences of my life!"

Ben Kaufman, Quirky

In high school, Ben Kaufman tapped his parents’ second mortgage to create Mophie, an iPod accessory company he sold in 2007. Two years later, he launched Quirky, which develops consumer products through a unique online collaboration with inventors. Quirky has raised $170 million to date, and recently sold a minority stake to GE to expand their co-branded WINK line of connected appliances. Quirky’s estimated 2013 revenue is $50 million.

Danielle Fong, Lightsail

A two-time 30 Under 30 alum, Danielle Fong has invented a novel energy storage system that could solve renewable energy's intermittancy problem. Her system, now under commercial development, takes wind or solar energy and uses it to compress air. Air compression generates a lot of heat. To capture that heat energy they inject a water mist into the compression chamber; the water readily absorbs the heat. The hot water and compressed air are both stored until the energy is needed. As the air is released from compression the hot water is sprayed into the air stream, adding its energy to the stream. The resulting mechanical energy spins turbines to generate electricity. LightSail has received more than $30 million in funding from the likes of Bill Gates, Peter Theil and Khosla Ventures.

Eden Full, Sun Saluter

Eden Full is working to perfect her Sun Saluter low-cost solar panel, which she has designed to gradually move on a fulcrum during the day so that it follows the sun for optimal power generation. She's deployed early models to countries like Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. In an ingenious invention, the solar panel's sun-tracking mechanism consists of two 2-liter bottles of water, attached upside down to a drip-filtration system hung from one side of the panel. At the beginning of the day the bottles start full. As the water slowly drips out into the filtration device, their weight is slowly reduced, thus enabling a counterbalance attached to the other side of the panel to slowly turn the panel to track the path of the sun. At the end of the day, the device has filtered 4 liters of water, and generated approximately 40% more electricity than a stationary panel would have. Full estimates that because of her SunSaluter deployments 6,000 people now have access to power and clean water.

Bryce Goodman, BlueOak Resources

Bryce Goodman, co-founder BlueOak Resources, is a former precious metal commodity trader and student at Singularity University, co-founded a disruptive urban mining business to alleviate the environmental and social challenges of e-waste, while simultaneously disrupting the precious metal industry. BlueOak Resources is an urban mining company commercializing novel and sustainable solutions for recovering high value metals from electronic waste or ‘e-waste’. According to the United Nations, e-waste is the fastest growing waste stream in the world. However, the vast majority of e-waste currently ends up in landfill or is shipped to the developing world to undergo ‘informal’ recycling that is both ineffective and toxic to human health and the environment. Despite such challenges, metal recovery from e-waste presents a compelling economic opportunity: whereas a ton of commercial grade gold ore contains, on average, between one to five grams of gold, the amount of gold in a ton of cell phones can exceed five hundred grams. BlueOak’s vision is to revolutionize how we treat end of life electronics: converting the e-waste of today into a sustainable source of critical metals and rare earths for the technologies of tomorrow.

Taylor Wilson, nuclear prodigy

At age 10 Taylor Wilson memorized the periodic table of elements. At age 11 he built a bomb out of sugar and stump remover that he found in his garage. At age 14 he became the youngest ever to construct a working "fusor" or nuclear fusion reactor. Since then, he's invented a cheap radiation detector that piqued the interest of the Department of Homeland Security and was the subject of a long article in Popular Science. He's spent the past year, since his first inclusion on the Forbes 30 Under 30, designing modular, fail-safe, small-scale nuclear fission reactors that would be powered by nuclear waste. He'll turn 20 next year.

Allison Sawyer, Rebellion Photonics

Allison Lami Sawyer is the CEO and co-founder of Rebellion Photonics, which is commercializing a unique snap-shot hyperspectral imaging technology that can see otherwise invisible clouds of gas better than existing methods. Cameras outfitted with Rebellion technology will help spot leaks in chemical plants and gas pipelines. Also promising for defense and biological research applications. Company was spun out of Rice University.

Adam Kell, FlameStower

Stanford engineering student Adam Kell has invented a compact, portable power source for camping and wilderness adventures that generates electricity with heat from cookstoves or campfires. The heat energy is transformed into electric current that can charge USB-powered devices like cell phones. Kell's startup, FlameStower, is working to deploy the technology to needy families in sub-Saharan Africa.

Pure Fix Cycles

At school in Madison, Wisconsin, Austin Stoffers, Jordan Schau and Michael Fishman just wanted some basic bikes at a decent price. So they started making them. Soon their lightweight, no-frills, no-brakes, fixed-gear (or "fixie") bikes were in such demand they couldn't make them fast enough. They brought in Jordan's brother Zach Schau, and moved the company from Madison to L.A. Now Pure Fix sells about 25,000 bikes a year in dozens of colors. Sales surpassed $4 million in 2012. Stoffers grew up in an entrepreneurial family which owned and operated a furniture import business. This came in handy when Pure Fix started to source parts from factories overseas. Watch out Schwinn!